WITI reporter heads west after 'happy' Milwaukee stint

Henry Rosoff starts new job at Seattle's KIRO-TV Wednesday

It was three and out for Henry Rosoff, the WITI-TV (Channel 6) reporter who left the station last week. He started at WITI in 2010 and, when his contract was up for renewal, he looked around at opportunities, hoping to land closer to family in New Jersey.

Instead, he ended up about as far away from them as you can get and still be in the continental United States.

On Wednesday, he starts at KIRO-TV in Seattle. And he knows just how far Seattle's Safeco Field is from Miller Park, having driven every one of those miles in one marathon commute with his fiancée by his side and his dog, Violet, in the back seat.

Rosoff moves from the 34th-ranked TV market to the 12th-ranked. But he also goes from covering high-profile stories - like Paul Ryan in Boston on election night, for WITI, which he called "a huge honor" - to being the new guy on the wake-up shift.

"I don't want this to be seen as me fleeing Milwaukee," Rosoff said by phone while driving through Montana. "I would have been happy to stay. Since the beginning, (WITI) put me on out front . . . in so many big stories. I would have had no fears about staying. It would have been the safe move."

But the Seattle job became available, and like a true 25-year-old, he opted for the adventure of the unknown.

Rosoff studied journalism at Northwestern University and, after internships in Lansing, Mich., and South Dakota, landed in Waco, Texas, "the biggest market that would have me." While there, he covered the shooting at Fort Hood that left 12 dead "and got some national exposure." Afterward, former WITI news director Jim Lemon "took a shot on me," said Rosoff, who was 22 at the time.

If his face or name isn't familiar, area news viewers may recall some of his coverage. His "first big splash" here was an awkward story about a female bus driver who "did her business on the bus." "We owned that story for a week or so," Rosoff said.

He counted a story on a reformed skinhead and an attack on service dogs near Green Bay among his more valuable work.

The skinhead story was "my first big long-form story." Rosoff said he followed the service dog story for a year and a half, and the seven- to eight-minute story he filed to tell it "is something I'll never get to do again."

He called such long-form feature stories a specialty of news director John LaPorte and unique to the Milwaukee market.

Rosoff said young Milwaukee reporters at various stations share a "collegial relationship," but it's nothing compared to "when you're truly in a small market" like Waco, where all the young TV reporters "don't know anyone, so they all hang out."

While Rosoff was driving through the Northwest trying to pick up distant car radio signals, the rest of America was galvanized by live TV news coverage of the manhunt for the surviving Boston Marathon bombing suspect Friday, traditionally one of the lowest-rated TV nights of the week. Viewers in Milwaukee were riveted and, at certain points, ratings here doubled.

But it was tough to make apples-to-apples comparisons, since local stations moved in and out of network coverage as the search waxed and waned, and viewers channel-surfed or abandoned local stations for coverage on cable news channels.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, an estimated 40 million people were tuned in to cable and broadcast network coverage of the manhunt Friday night. Fox News Channel won the cable battle with 5.2 million total viewers - although CNN topped Fox among the 18- to 34-year-old demographic - and NBC was the most watched broadcast network, with 10.7 million viewers.

In Milwaukee, ABC coverage on WISN-TV (Channel 12) was most watched between about 6 p.m., the time news broke locally that the suspect was cornered, through 10 p.m., with a 7.8 rating average. NBC coverage on WTMJ-TV (Channel 4) averaged a 7 rating; CBS coverage on WDJT-TV (Channel 58) averaged 4.2; and WITI averaged 3.6.

However, the average total number of households tuned to the coverage - about 205,660 - was actually less than the average total number of households tuned in during the same hours over 28 days during February sweeps. Since Friday ratings for WTMJ and WISN were up but ratings for the other two stations were down, compared with February, the result was something of a wash.

Local viewership during the morning hours, however, jumped noticeably, by about 37,000 viewers.

According to TVNewser, 68% of Boston households watched local TV coverage of the bombing suspect's capture. An additional 11% watched cable news coverage. At one point, 1.7 million out of a total audience of 2.3 million TV households watched local coverage.

Although Monday's "Entertainment Tonight" lead story was the drunken-driving-related arrest of Reese Witherspoon, it found time for its own Boston Marathon bombing coverage. "E.T." "reported" that the surviving suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, watched the AMC show "Breaking Bad" and praised it on his Twitter account saying that it, "taught me how to dispose of a corpse."

WBME-TV - Channel 41, which is available over the air at 58.2 and on Time Warner Cable at Channel 19 - airs a tribute to actor Allan Arbus, who died Friday at age 95. Arbus played psychiatrist Sidney Freedman on "M*A*S*H," and the nostalgia channel will air two episodes featuring the character Thursday at 6 p.m.